Madison and Jefferson

Also by Andrew Burstein

The Original Knickerbocker:
The Life of Washington Irving

Jefferson’s Secrets:
Death and Desire at Monticello

The Passions of Andrew Jackson

Letters from the Head and Heart:
Writings of Thomas Jefferson

America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation
Remembered Fifty Years of Independence

Sentimental Democracy:
The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image

The Inner Jefferson:
Portrait of a Grieving Optimist

Also by Nancy Isenberg

Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr

Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America

Co-edited by Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein

Mortal Remains: Death in Early America

There is very little difference in that superstition which
leads us to believe in what the world calls “great men” and in that which leads us to believe in witches and conjurors.

—
DR. BENJAMIN RUSH TO JOHN ADAMS
, 1808

THOMAS JEFFERSON (1743–1826) AND JAMES MADISON (1751–1836)
were country gentlemen who practiced hardball politics in a time of intolerance. As agents of the American Enlightenment, they took premeditated action to overturn ingrained ideas they saw as insidious and unrepublican. As keen political operatives, they fought to humble some equally determined individuals whom they considered misguided or simply threatening. Like all politicians, Madison and Jefferson walked a fine line in condemning corruption while exercising power. They risked their personal prestige because they saw imminent danger. They were watchful. They were guarded. Their times did not allow for complacency.

We need a better understanding than we currently possess of the strong-willed politicians who helped mold the United States. Our modern leaders quote the founders in magnificent tones, hoping to obtain insights into their minds. But they know them mainly as indefatigable characters in an oft-told and problematic story—they tend to see the founders as they were on their best days. The discipline of history exists to reexamine time-honored treatments of people and events, and to separate myth from reality. Historians are concerned, above all, with accuracy in interpretation. As researchers, they are expected to navigate competing explanations and sort out ideological biases. That is how this book came about.

Previous biographers are not in all ways to blame for common effusions and misconceptions. Present beliefs about the early years of the American republic derive to a considerable extent from falsehoods the participants themselves planted, their filial offspring nurtured, and commemorative ritual compounded. Each generation gets to weigh in anew.

One might expect this book to be titled
Jefferson and Madison
rather than
Madison and Jefferson.
Its closest relative,
Jefferson and Madison: The Great
Collaboration
(1950), by Adrienne Koch, remains a serviceable piece of scholarship. The ever-quotable author of the Declaration of Independence took precedence in Koch’s title for the same reason that a beautiful monument was erected to his memory in the Tidal Basin of Washington, D.C., in 1943. Madison, the dry, distant “Father of the Constitution,” generated little posthumous sentiment.

Textbooks highlight the “Age of Jefferson.” Madison’s high point as a public figure is generally associated with the one banner year of 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met; his low point was an unheroic flight from the President’s House during the British invasion of 1814. His manner and moods remain obscure, his long congressional career understudied. What could be a better invitation to learn more?

Our title is not meant to be cute or ironic. It is not to degrade Jefferson as a force in politics—not one iota—but rather to suggest that it is time to reevaluate their relationship and their distinct individual contributions. Popular historians have done precious little with Madison. And while political scientists have boiled him down to his noteworthy contributions to
The Federalist Papers
, the historians who place him within the larger context of party formation have presented Madison as a man unaffected by an emotional life, a man eclipsed by the more magnetic, more affecting Jefferson.

People have long been tempted to compare the third and fourth presidents. In 1824 an itinerant bookseller called on the Virginia neighbors. Jefferson was a man of “more imagination and passion,” he said; Madison, “more natural, candid and profound.” What exactly does this distinction mean? Did Madison lack imagination and passion? Was Jefferson less profound? The bookseller had spent too little time with his potential customers to know them at all well, and he was speaking in relative terms anyway.
¹

As a persuasive stylist, Jefferson described the idea of America in ways that students of history have long admired. Investing his words with lyrical power, he indulged often in a sentimental idiom. So yes, he possessed imagination and passion. Madison had a literary faculty too, and a rich wit. But he succeeded foremost as a deliberative, direct, and usually (though not always) tactful legislator. Stepping before the public, he was not concerned with style in the way Jefferson was. Madison preferred to supply information that enlivened an intellectual atmosphere. So yes, he was both candid and profound.

Even though Madison was unsentimental, he was every bit as intense as his more inspirational friend. Those who write about the American founding are dead wrong when they make Madison stiff and stilted. And some historians have rendered Jefferson so placid and elegant as to deprive him of spontaneous moments. Men and women who observed them at their most relaxed, in close quarters, remarked that Madison’s facility for conversational humor sometimes led him to make Jefferson the butt of a joke, and Jefferson to laugh so well that he nearly cried. The chapter headings alone instruct the reader that ours is a book about the ruthlessness of politics, aimed at demonstrating what is missing from the genre of Revolutionary heroics. Yet we do not lose sight of the power of personality, without which the annals of time would be cold, linear histories featuring absurdly rational actors.

The founders did not resist when the national creation story was brilliantly painted and sculpted in marble and their personal exploits made into something nobler than they were. We should not expect them to have done otherwise. The truth, however, is that Madison, Jefferson, and their peers loathed as well as they loved. As they chased self-serving objectives, they got bogged down in banking arrangements and caught up in obstacles associated with seductive land deals. To a far greater extent than most realize, their public lives were conditioned by matters of personal health and vital impulses not usually part of the historical record. The giants of politics past immersed themselves in mundane matters that, taken together, measured social status. They juggled responsibilities and were dismayed by unexpected outcomes in many areas of their lives.

To celebrate blindly those who were long ago given poetic protection as “founding fathers,” and who remain in the national spotlight today as
our
protectors, invites massive self-deception. In this book we do not denigrate, but historicize, the patriotic impulse. We do all we can to reconstitute the gritty world in which Madison and Jefferson operated. We guide the reader through nuances in eighteenth-century American English—a foreign language in many respects—to help make better historical sense of the emotional range within individual experience. Compared to our own time, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were primal and suggestible when it came to people’s expectations from life. Yet they were decidedly flamboyant times too, with more ill feeling than studied consensus. This alien culture, which eventually became ours, is more interesting when we strip away the loving haze.

Let us set aside for a moment America’s early heroes and speak about
the materials of history. It was not a comprehensive mind that brought forth the republic’s critical texts. It was, to a large degree, the “tribal” identities of men like Madison and Jefferson, who were Virginians first and keenly aware of the clannish objections that one part of the continent had to the positions and attitudes of another. Though we associate their rich organizing talents with their commanding national legacies, they did nothing without first asking,
How will this play in Virginia?

If this book has one overriding purpose, it is to bring back overlooked elements in a panicky political culture that dangerously provoked as often as it positively motivated Madison and Jefferson and those who fell into their circle. What reassurance Madison and Jefferson obtained, as they fought for what they believed in, derived in a very real way from the trust they eventually came to lodge in each other. Their partnership was one of the few constants either of them knew over his long political life. Yet it is wrong to suppose that they thought alike, as we will show at length.

They were insatiable readers. They both read extensively in the law. But they were not powerful courtroom pleaders of the sort that swayed juries with oratorical flourishes. That was their close acquaintance and formidable opponent Patrick Henry. Madison never argued a case in court, and Jefferson defended his clients’ interests with minimum verbiage. They were concerned with the law in bookish ways; it helped them think of how to improve civil society. This may sound uninviting at first, but their common immersion in dry treatises sheds light on their popular political agendas and cannot be divorced from a history of their long collaboration. If we are to be thorough, we must recover the unromantic elements that produced moments of real excitement.